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now now we're recording so my name is Joe Lynch and thank you all for signing up for the class and this class is all about lead generation and sales for three PL and transportation pros and I really want to make this class worthwhile for everybody in this class I want to I want to talk to everybody offline i hope we can all develop some relationships having said that i don't know if any of us compete probably do probably you guys compete against each other so I want to keep everything very confidential in this class so if there's anything that you hear in here in the in the course I don't want that to be talked about outside of that you know having said that if you have super confidential stuff you probably won't mention any way so having gotten all that house keys are the ways anyone have any questions okay I'm sure you will so I left everybody unmuted and that makes it a little easier for you to speak out if you don't have anything to say at that one minute please just mute yourself and what I'd like to do is go through this if you have questions along the way please ask i'm sure other people have them and if you have questions outside of this you of course please send me an email or give me a phone call and one other little tidbit that I was hoping wouldn't happen but did happen is I have to blow out of here a few minutes early like probably 15 minutes early um a meeting that I could not avoid its guts came after the after I set this up but I will make it up to you guys through offline conversations and or make sure everyone gets their money's worth so let's get started so this is a presentation that many of you have already seen but I want to go through it because it's kind of the basis of everything that I've been doing over the last few years with my myself and also with some consulting customers I have and it's really this the whole idea of 3pl lead generation best practices and just to give you a quick background I is the general manager of a non asset-based 3pl and I made some sales and I was leading leading sales guy but as I started to bring on some some people to help me and the owner of the company we struggle we we didn't have a successful salesperson and I realized we're bringing in good sales people but they just weren't having the impact we had hoped and what what we what we learned along the way was we didn't have any good leads so I really started focusing my energies miss Cooke back about four or five years ago on how do I get better leads and so that led me on the journey of starting a blog and ultimately starting this business which is helping 3 l's transportation companies logistics companies yet do better in sales and since the sale starts online lead generation so you guys are probably many of you have already seen this this is a download from my website and again I just want to add some some context to it I don't think this is surprised anybody the shipper has really changed as a result of our technology they're on their phone constantly there on the laptop constantly very distracted they're also they're also starting to sail the buying process online so oftentimes they know a lot more than they used to because they're informing themselves online they're they're educating themselves they're also following experts I'll throw myself in that category I guess it's arguable I write I write about logistics and transportation and shippers follow me and I get phone calls as a result I get emails as a result and a lot of times they're just educating themselves and I don't get the business but they're they're they're they're looking for experts online so the so the internet really has changed everything the buying the buying process begins online and from my way of thinking if you're not there to find them online you're not going to get the business and some cases and and I think a lot of our industry still believes that the buying process and the sales process is the same sales guy who says I just get all my leads from making phone calls kind of has this belief that the buying process began when I called this guy on the phone doesn't work that way I would also throw out 3pl sales and I say 3p I also main transportation logistics whatever the hell you want to call yourself the business has changed there's a ton of non asset-based brokers out there there's a ton of new technologies out there website services there's really out of seems like a daily influx of new companies every major logistics company seems to be using the agency model to just grow and grow and grow their their sales force so there's a lot of lot of feet on the ground selling which makes it very difficult to get your message out and I think even if you have a great message if 10 guys have made the same phone call you are that week by the time you get to the person you're selling to even if you have a great message sometimes it doesn't matter so I would also say cold calling doesn't work to them to the same extent that it used to is this is this in keeping with what you guys are noticing I'll take that as a yes so yeah so sorry I was muted no problem so so the big question is is has your lead generation kept pace and I think you know if your lead generation still consists of just cold calling I would say you're you're behind the times I believe that again the buying process begins online people are looking for experts and I asked you guys to do this think about all this stuff you buy if you buy I guess I just had to buy a new laptop where did I go first online to start looking what's a good new laptop I didn't want to buy 1i drop mine and so I research everything online now I ultimately bought it at best buy but I still researched it prior to getting the best buy almost everything we do we search online first and I don't and I believe that people who are buying 3pl services are doing the same if you're not online I think your lead generation and sales are just going to suffer and I think also if you if you're a lot of the people in this course are our management people if you aren't supporting your sales team with lead generation I think you're you're hurting yourself and you're hurting your guys I think if you have 10 sales guys put one of them as a job as lead generation it's it's if they can feed leads to all of your guys that's well worth their time but we'll get into that boy look so also throw this out there is value proposition there's a lot of companies who seem to say the same thing non asset-based brokers an LTL all say the same thing it's almost it's oh we have a great software we have lower rates that we've negotiated and we have a TMS that you can use and we have great service and I always think it's it's kind of almost a nonsense thing to say everybody when everybody's saying it you become kind of just part of the mob is that I wrote an article the other day called invisible you become invisible when your value proposition is the same as everybody else and it hurts your lead gen guys stop me if you've got questions along the way so as you all know if there is a better way to connect and it's it's the internet and what I'm really looking to use what I've done and what I want to help you guys do is I want to help you figure out your market have you already know that and then find a way to develop an ongoing relationship with that market and it's a it's just a great way to go and how I look at this is kind of a force multiplier we all are all of you are in sales or responsible for salespeople you can only make so many phone calls you can only make so many you send so many emails you can only make so many personal visits but if you can get to the point that you've developed a tribe of some sort a list of people who trust you and want to work with you or at least one stay connected to you you're going to do a lot better and that's that ongoing relationship and then we're going to talk about how to build that ongoing relationship and there at the bottom it says hey the goal this isn't just to be an author or to be a speaker its sales so again I use the term 3pl sales platform you can call whatever you want sustainable sustainable of lead generation is what I'm look at what I'm talking about and how you do that is you you build it you build a relationship with your market I'll talk about that a little more so again I touched on this idea of a sales platform I didn't invent the term sales platform I just kind of added 3pl sales will have to learn to it but what we're talking about is a web presence of some sort content marketing which we'll get into a little bit in just a minute once you've created that content you got to distribute it and then you got to capture leads and that's how you start to build the tribe the tribe might follow you but if you don't know that your email addresses your you can't nurture those leads with email marketing which is an excellent way to work so also when you start communicating with the market ideally you're communicating stuff that they want to hear and it's going to build your credibility I talked to a number of the guys who are in this class offline and I hope to talk to all of you before or we're done offline and they're flat-out experts in this space but if the people if the only people who know you're an expert the people you're currently talking to your kind of limiting yourself you got to get them message out that hey look I'm an expert and the company I work for we're more experts you know it's kind of that almost like if a tree falls in the woods and and nobody's there is no one hears it it's kind of the same I'm kind of watch that but my point is if you're an expert but nobody knows it are you really an expert so Ken's and we're starting in the political season here in the US and I look at a sales platform is similar to like a political platform it's a way to get your message out it's a way to communicate hopefully build a two-way communication with your customers in your market questions just jump in guys so again just a sec so make sure can everybody hear me okay yes sir yes good good so what is a sales platform again it gets you some visibility we're a very crowded market space if you're in logistics and transportation what you want is you want to be seen you want to be seen by the right people you want to be able to communicate you want to be seen as an expert you're going to be seeing G seen as an expert not an idiot there's a lot of experts but they aren't seen so that's what we want to help you become seen build the tribe you want to build a following that people can find you and and and if you have a list of a thousand people who know and trust you and think you're a very good transportation provider that's a that's a really nice thing to have when your time on sales again that's what we're all here for and I'm just a second guys my slide stuck here there we go so we talked about this process of a sales platform it really has three pieces of it the first one is content and you have to you have to create some content will talk about what content is there's a million different ways to create it then we have to distribute and capture the leads we have to distribute the content and capture leads and the leads are marketing leads we'll talk a little bit about that in a second but a marketing lead is a little different than a sales lead somebody might download something for me or come to a webinar that youth hosted that doesn't necessarily mean they're going to buy from you tomorrow but that's a marketing lead that you can put on your list and begin nurturing and this is the way you know I didn't invent this this is the way it's done with sales marketing a lot of people disconnected marketing in the transportation business because I think they looked at and so we can't afford it or it's not worth having but a good marketing group is joined at the hip with the sales group and I think if you don't have a marketing group than you get it you got to create one again or you got to be v1 then once you have that marketing lead the idea is to nurture it and that's by continuing to provide good information to that to that person that lead okay this the webinar sometimes things stick content marketing is is a way to create valuable relevant information for Europe your audience and in this case we're going to say your market and get a little more into it once you understand your market you all know who you're selling to when you start talking about developing some content for that market the idea is to figure out what their biggest problems are that you can fix and start creating content that allows you to connect with them so let's just say you know let's say you're doing shipments to Puerto Rico that's your main business us to Puerto Rico and you have been doing it long enough that you know that there's six or seven problems that come up all the time you write an article six you know 66 things they go wrong on Puerto Rico shipments and how to solve them and that makes you put by publishing that you're going to connect with people they're going to say oh hey this is good the only reason they read it is because they're interested because they ship to puerto rico where they're going to ship to puerto rico and at that point you found somebody worth worth finding or they found you which is even more important so you want to develop content that aligns to the problems that your customers have or the opportunities they want to take advantage of and if you have multiple cut at multiple markets then you develop content for all of them and I say content will get into more what that is on the next line here so content marketing is kind of the future of all marketing everybody's every major organization says there's the content marketing and somewhere they're going to spend more money in their future you can have you don't see almost across the board every every company every major company that has money to spend on marketing says this is where we're heading so you as you know there's lots of articles on websites there's newsletters blog posts case studies video is a big one now use you know creating articles for other people's websites in-person events white papers webinars or webcasts research reports microsites on you know how that is infographics um there's a lot of different things ebooks there's a lot of different ways and I think it's really the the format that it takes is less important than the fact that you're doing it that you're creating something to connect with people and again the top ones here at then that you see used a lot in the ones I use so I do write a blog I write articles from magazines for my customers and for myself I I do white papers I do webinars I'm doing this webinar as a training course but other webinars I've done as lead generation and I've made sales from it lots of sales from any questions I'm not born guys over there so once you've developed content you have to get it found one way to get a foundling to say you wrote an article or an infographic or an e-book whatever it is you have to use search engine marketing or search engine optimization to get it found the things that you know as far as finding a website google google wants wants to send their customers which are the people using the internet to the very best source so if you create a great article on shipping to Puerto Rico and somebody's looking for shipments to Puerto Rico they want Google wants them to find you it's important that your create content that you follow SEO and sem best practices so your stuff can be found and there it's a search engines rank on site architecture meaning how usable is it really how fast the things download and i find stuff on your site content optimization meaning is it relevant and then relationship building relationship building is means the other people reference your site stuffs not easy you should hire a pro for that another great way to share content is there's all sorts of websites out there i have a website there's other people i work with who have websites who are always looking for great content you don't have to so you might say i got a website but no one goes to it and i'm not going to spend a lot of money doing SEO and i'm not going to you can go to other peoples site and say hey I created this ebook will you help me market it if it's relevant to them they will you're probably not going to be able to do that on your competitors website but there's there's a lot of people who are in supply chain and logistics who don't compete with you so again I got here supply chain brief those are guys I'm close relationships with they publish my stuff and I help them to next distribution we talked a little bit about this was distribution on other people's websites distribution using social media social media is a great tool but without content it's an empty suit you know you can share on linkedin in your latest favorite joke but who cares you can go on facebook and say i work for a logistics company who cares you say we opened a new office maybe it matters to somebody you have to create something to share or find something to share you could share something that's relevant to your market that you didn't write that somebody else wrote again if you're working in puerto rico and there's some governmental changes their or their debt crisis you can write about it or you have somebody else wrote about you can share it the big for when it comes to business and logistics and supply chain is linkedin facebook twitter and youtube and they're all very good facebook is my least favorite because again i don't think people go on there looking for transportation stuff but some big players who are using it successfully but you know regardless of what you're doing on those you've got to learn the running rules and again i still say you have to have something great to say on those before you start sharing now this is a big you're distributing content you have to capture leads so that means you have to give people an excuse to give you your very their email so the way I see it you're earning their email so if you let them sign up for if they sign up for your webinar they sign up with an email they got something of value the information from the webinar and you got something about you their email and their name very important if you can have a list of again a thousand people who will work with you or at least know who you are because they attended your webinar download your ebook you you're much better position as a sales sales later any questions on capturing leads okay I talked to touch a little bit throughout here this whole idea of email marketing for every dollar spent on email marketing you get forty dollars back that that that's been a very consistent number from Direct Marketing Association and other companies that track that kind of thing and that's just an incredible return on investment I'd be happy to show anyone how to get started with email marketing I'll just share this little tidbit here we're all connected on LinkedIn I think everybody in this group is on LinkedIn you can go on linkedin and export your your contacts into a csv file which is like excel then you can upload that into an email marketing service and it's free until you get to like 500 names free and you can do some email marketing to people who are on your LinkedIn i would suggest you take off people who are relevant but if you just said m is going to send an email blast out to 100 people who are who are my potential customers i'm going to put it in linked i'm going to put it into a tool and maybe the message could be an IV I've done this we're connected on LinkedIn as the title the subject of the email and I've got remarkably good response I send an email that says we're connected on linkedin and then there's one sentence on there that says hey I so I sell transportation when I was selling transportation I sell transportation and I was hoping you could connect me to the person in your organization that that buys transportation and alive I got a lot of e-mails back right away that said that's me you make all other times I got an email or phone number they talked to Bob over it you know our corporate headquarters you can start email marketing this afternoon all of us have all of us have enough people in our contact list if you haven't already started email marketing you need to start thinking about it people buy from email marketing more than they buy from Twitter more from Facebook more than any other source they buy from email marketing and boy a lot of us hate getting the spam I know everybody hates it so you don't want to send nonsense to your people but I think if you can share good information with them you're ahead of the game so again kind of pulling all this together if you're going to get into building a sales platform or as you know again I'll say a sustainable approach to lead generation that uses content you have to you have to have the right attitude about this you have to have the idea that i'm going to share this information guys the leaders of our business of our industry are at conferences today standing on stages sharing everything they know mine is probably a few tidbits about the industry and they know darn well half the people in the audience aren't their customers mostly people in the audience or the competition that's what leaders do they share share great information goes back the beginning of time the elder is talking around the campfire telling us how when to when to hunt when to fish I would also say this process of building a platform building it to your credibility takes take some time it's really the right way to go to develop your business yeah i'm i like to track numbers on this stuff but again you start if you had ten great emails addresses of people who really liked you that's a lot better than a thousand that are indifferent to you so don't get too carried away with the stats any questions on a this okay so let me ask a quite how many of you are currently doing any sort of email marketing not me I have been I mean in a different in a different life i want sell it you know a lot of this is is good if i can just say something i probably you know when when you've drawn the analogy to politics and I I had a little bit of experience in that arena and one of the things that when you're putting it together political campaign is your you're definitely car going because you you know you're not going to convince a hundred percent of people to vote for you even Saddam Hussein only got ninety five percent I think of this you're really just trying to get you know fifty percent plus one and and I think that's true in transportation marketing as well so I like that you do that analogy because it neelam of marketing wait you know this whole idea of a sales platform there's a guy named Michael Hyatt and he wrote a book about it I think this is very interesting he's the CEO of one of the largest publishers in the US and he realized that after a while the only authors who were getting published authors who had developed sales platforms and and I don't know if he sales platforms they call them platforms for sure I think its sales platforms and what he meant by that is if you were going to sell a fishing book the other let's just say two guys come and say say hey look I'm a world-class fisherman and I want to come sell my book here I wrote a book will you market it for me and what he said as a publisher is if one guy was just a great fisherman and the other guy's a fisherman who went to fishing shows every weekend had done some ebooks had a huge following on line one the world championship of fishing or whatever competitions relevant those are the guys who are getting the books and he says there's some great authors he says who were never getting published because they didn't have the ability to market their book he says keep mind that's what market that's what publishing companies are supposed to do they're supposed to be there supposed to be a 0 Chris thanks for joining us um they're supposed to be marketing and that yet they still want somebody have a platform because it's that that recognition is so important so so guys I didn't look at everybody's linkedin profile but i looked at a number of linkedin profiles for this group and you know for the most part there's a lot of people with a lot of experience in this group and one of the things though i will suggest is doesn't look like too many people are have taken their have written anything on linkedin and oops sorry about that guys oh oh my my screens froze again give me just a moment so let me lies like that back the best night huh it it is not the computer it's the it's the stock work for webinars and they all do it every single one of them this is go to go to training it's it's it's expensive even that drives me crazy that even the expensive ones hang up but I'm so there we go so as anybody here published an article on linkedin this is steve i have okay good good so many so guys what else what I'll show you here is and they think this is a great way to start because I know I I consult to a number of companies the things I've noticed is everyone wants to do content marketing but nobody has the time to write an article or you know even think about what to do and it's myself included I'm busy I wish I wish I didn't have to write an article here or there or do content marketing or my business but I do do it and I think if you're saying look I make 40 hours a week of phone calls but I don't have time to write an article if the phone calls are making a lot of money then don't write the article but if you're struggling with the phone calls maybe it's time to do some content marketing I say write articles maybe create a video whatever it is or even share other people's stuff anyway if you go on to LinkedIn there's there's me and my name and right there it says publish a post so if you were to click that button it should be advancing you just click that button in here's i have a blog i have a website and i published from magazines but this is one of the best things i do is publish on linkedin I'll show you why soon as my computer cooperates you can publish a post on linkedin and and I know what you're all saying is on what I don't have anything to share I don't want it so I don't have time you could make it very simple you could do this today has just write a quick of 55 reasons for this or six lessons I've learned something very basic just a list and make it six bullet points it doesn't have to be anything fancy and in fact I think in a way the fancier it is the more people think oh this is too polished I think it's a sales pitch if you genuinely share five or six of the ideas it could be the you know unique selling propositions for your business you know the right way to manage air freight you can publish that article and here's the crazy thing about it we're all allowed to join 50 groups on LinkedIn and I would suggest you join the right 50 groups for your business and then once you do that you write this article and then you share it is a little button that's little linkedin um button you share that that five or six bullet points in 50 groups and look that means your article is now in effect published to a magazine I mean linkedin readership is so big if you're in 50 groups most groups are a hundred thousand people I have a group that's my group the logistics of logistics is 72,000 people in it so so you can you can basically self-published today all of us can write six bullet points we write emails we write PowerPoint you could write six lessons I've learned about whatever business you're in write that article and publish it 250 groups and again those 50 groups might be a million people there's a lot of groups that are 100,000 plus so I think it's a great opportunity if you're interested in starting that is the great place to start you don't have to do anything to your website you don't have to do anything fancy just six bullet points a quick article any questions on that anybody going to do that Natalie my out like I only have one more slide to share here but it's not getting to it but up again again regardless of where your regardless of where you're going you can't share your expertise if you're not willing to write it down or put it on the I panel of some sort of medium to share it so that that's that's my message today's if you want to do content marketing you want to build this of a way to get leads online it starts with content it starts with write stuff down so any any questions on either any questions I may just have we thought Joe I can say that the you know publishing a post on linking the first time you do it you might not get a whole lot of stuff but if you do it regularly it does actually daily if you do it regularly and and have some content that's worth sharing it's amazing how many people start to follow you on LinkedIn even though they're not linked with you and it's aw does it produces it produces however response i'm sorry who is this talking steve harlan okay Steve all right thank well thank you for that that's that that is so true i mean I'm a living example of that is my i get so many response I all day I get people saying Connect connect connect I also get people calling me saying hey I'm I need a new 3pl and I'm just calling to see if you could help me out now since I have a number of three pls who are my customers yes of course I can help them out I never got that before I was selling 3pl services I call everybody in their brother and not get it not get a sale and now I great are goals and I said I don't make cold calls like I used to I this is not worth my time what's work better for me is calls from people who sent me a name and calling people who sent me an email I would also Steve you touched on something about when you publish you might not guess anything to start but for are you cackling but not yeah your friends will your friends will like it like this you know I'd picked well this is where this is where you know I mentioned I want us to build some relationships and while we're connected here Steve if you were to write an article today and say hey I joke and you share this I know you you're connected to a lot of people and I share it with my network um hello I'm connected to 4,000 people well of course I'm you know we're working together I share it for you you start building a few relationships there's a number of people who who always share my information and it's like a force multiplier so you you find a number of people the people who create content in logistics and supply chain all help each other some of the top sloggers in the logistics business I'm friends with them because I promote their stuff and they promote mine and it's the way the way we all look at it is there's you know trillions of dollars worth of business and we're all only looking for a few million so you start to build a network when you and it's inadvertent what happens as soon as you start creating content other people who created say and it's a good article because they know what it's like to write an article they know it took a lot longer than it seems like it should I would also suggest this I've learned this alone the way is you got to write something that's sincere and that's that makes sense people want to use you know fancy words to write articles it does they don't resonate people look to connect to humans not to mba students i think also you if you're publishing a post here hang on just a sec maybe my computer will advance this time oops there did yeah this is it if you click this button on linkedin go to the next page you gotta add an image get an image from google image or go to one of the stock photos places stock photo will cost you a dime get up get a pretty picture a picture that captures people's attention and then for your title use something that's that's that catches their attention also and again everyone loves lists and i think about around tax time you'll always see of articles to say six six things that most taxpayers are going to six deductions that most taxpayers overlooked and you're like not damn i gotta look at that I don't want to look at it I'm pretty sure I know what that is but I got open it and that's the same kind of thing so if you say a six things that most shippers to Puerto Rico don't know about six ways to save money that most shippers don't know about that's something you read and then you know what you know is here and again I'm not going to say I'm a perfect example but i have learned some lessons I out this article the invisible transportation salesman the other gay this people seem to respond well to it I think partly because the picture of the invisible man on there and also it's a you're like hey what do you mean somebody's invisible I want to I want to know what he's talking about I wrote here about three PL sales obsession and that really was my story about if you don't have enough lead you tend to obsess over certain accounts um I think we all we all do that that's why you need more lead to see stop obsessing there's some there's some companies that I'm convinced myself I start spending the money in my head prior to even winning it and they're they're indifferent they say call me in a few months and it's almost like a unrequited love and we do it because we don't have enough sales leads so anyway as I mentioned at the beginning I do have to jump off I actually another webinar company webinar company asked me to step in and help them somebody bailed on them at the last minute so I said I would help but I will make this up to you I want to talk to everybody offline you have any questions about any of this or no please give me a call I want to make sure everybody in this class gets get started in this and it's not just going to this course you're listening to the to the recordings it's it's starting I want each one of you to write an article and it over an article there's a million different ways to get get your name out there and start building a list and that's what I want to help you guys do over the next four weeks any questions no very good yeah well thank you and again appreciate appreciate you guys taking this class and I really want to make it worth your while and and I what I really do hope is to build some relationships they go beyond this for weeks I hope you guys can build some to within the group want to build something that makes us all some money so I can continue to live indoors and eat every day all right gentlemen ladies thank you so much again feel free to connect with me online i'm going to make this this video available i did record it so if you ever miss a session you can get it and until next time I'll see you uh see online all right thank you all right thanks Kevin thanks everybody